‘Symbolic and Contagious’: Union Documentary Captures Amazon Labor Breakthrough

Amazon workers at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island shocked the world in 2022 when they voted to form the first American union at the e-commerce giant. A new documentary — Union — gives a behind-the-scenes look at how the unlikely labor campaign galvanized thousands of workers to vote yes at one of America’s most notoriously anti-union employers.

Directors Brett Story and Stephen Maing shoot vérité from the warehouse floor with the rag-tag group — not affiliated with an established union — that won over their coworkers by hosting constant cook-outs, engaging in deep conversations, and directly standing up to Amazon’s union-busting.

It would be difficult to make this film without focusing, as most media coverage has, on the formidable personality and former Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls. But Union tells a broader story of the mix of organizers who broke through, from veteran Amazon workers to young college graduates committed to improving conditions for the whole warehouse. (Spoiler: The movie climaxes with the 2,654 to 2,131 union election victory in April of 2022.) 

Since JFK8 voted yes, organizing campaigns have emerged at Amazon warehouses across the country. But progress on actually unionizing what is now America’s second largest private employer has been slow. Amazon has refused to entertain negotiations with workers at JFK8 — and has even waged a legal campaign against the very existence of the National Labor Relations Board.

The Amazon Labor Union voted to affiliate with the Teamsters this past summer and in December participated in a multi-day strike. For a look at how those actions went, you can watch Story and Maing’s documentary Local One here.

Inequality.org editors Chris Mills Rodrigo and Bella DeVaan recently spoke with Story and Maing about their film — a critical darling of Sundance Film Festival, shortlisted for the Best Documentary Academy Award, yet isolated from wider viewership by corporate distribution networks — and the role of media in building political consciousness. Union was released independently and can be rented online here.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Mills Rodrigo: How did you hear about this campaign and why did you decide that it was worth investing the time and effort into filming it?

Story: We were actually starting a film before they started the union campaign — our producers, Samantha and Mars, had been in touch with Chris [Smalls] about developing a project in the early months of 2020. He was in the news after he led that walkout at JFK8 and then was fired. There was that leaked memo by company brass saying let’s make him the face of the movement.

By the time we had started to develop a fuller film team, the Bessemer campaign was in full swing. In the immediate wake of that loss, Chris and the other folks at JFK8 decided that they were going to start their own unionization effort, and because we had already been developing this project, we knew immediately that that was an opportunity to document that struggle from day one. 

We were interested, obviously, in a campaign, but we didn’t know where it would go, we didn’t even know if it would get to an election. So for us, it wasn’t a campaign film. It was about a group of people, a new generation of labor organizers, becoming politicized and learning how and why to take on big corporate power in real time.

Mills Rodrigo: One of the most striking scenes in the film was the footage you obtained of a captive audience meeting. What did you learn about Amazon’s union-busting tactics while filming?

Maing: Amazon has been reported to have thrown about $14 million in anti-unionization efforts, labor consultants hired to sow distrust in the workplace. In a lot of warehouses, they’ve seen upwards of 20 captive audience meetings happening per day. There’s a tremendous sense that the corporations with this kind of power and resources are really tipping the scales against workers coming together and empowering themselves collectively. 

The interesting thing about working on this film was that the workers found their organizing and, in many ways, their political voices in response to these kinds of meetings. There’s this adage employers are the best organizers, and that was really profoundly seen in these captive audience meetings.

Mills Rodrigo: Another scene that stuck with me was the altercation between organizers and police outside of the facility. What was your experience filming at an aggressively anti-union company?

Maing: Amazon has tried to argue that all of the property, including the access roads and bus stop area is private property. But there are considerable swaths of property that, because an MTA bus uses that space, are clearly public property. They would eject us at times from filming there.

Regardless of how a company tries to define what is private and public space, it’s unconscionable for them to seek out the NYPD and use them as an extension of their coercion of workers and suppression of workers. We saw three times in the course of production that they deployed the NYPD in a way where it was unclear whether they were there because they saw a reason for them to impose themselves, or because Amazon had asked them to come there and threaten workers. 

DeVaan: What’s been your experience getting the movie out into the world, given the context of the strikes and constant mergers that define the political economy of Hollywood? 

Story: I just want to contextualize our launching this film into the world by saying that anyone who’s been doing work in the media landscape over the past five years knows that there’s a major crisis. 

I think those strikes that we saw with SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild were symptomatic of frustration, unrest, and the widespread recognition of media consolidation, a predatory position vis-à-vis the ecosystem as a whole wherein big streamers like Netflix and big companies like Disney monopolize the field. 

[They] have spent years buying and buying content, making it impossible for smaller players to continue to exist, and now are in a new phase of their own profit model where they answer to shareholders by employing leaner and leaner employment models — squeezing their own talent, trying to generate AI content, buy writers’ labor cheaper, and produce cheaper content. People who work in Hollywood are feeling that squeeze. 

Consumers are feeling that squeeze in terms of shows not being very good anymore. Independent documentary filmmakers are feeling that squeeze in terms of there being no buyers anymore, films aren’t being bought, they’re not being distributed. 

So we enter into that with this film launching at a big premier festival like Sundance. We premiered our film, we got great response, lots of critical acclaim, sold out screenings, and we even won an award. Pretty immediately our sales agent came back to us telling us that we were getting ‘no’s across the board, especially from the big distributors.

We immediately pivoted to a self-distribution strategy that has proven really valuable. It also produced a question about why that is. Is that just the market as a whole? Does it have to do with the actual subject of our film? I think the answer is all of these things. 

I think the media consolidation has resulted in fewer buyers, buying less content and making more conservative choices. We’ll hear that directly from big players like Netflix and Hulu that they’re not interested in anything that would be deemed controversial, in any way, politically controversial, artistically controversial, anything that doesn’t fit a pre-ordained formula.

Then there’s the added factor that our subjects directly take on the biggest company in the world that’s also a media player — Amazon Studios is an important source of income for a lot of people within our field. Some other distributors have said to us, “we need to maintain a relationship with Amazon Studios, and this would be really challenging for us to take on.” And then the fact that it’s about a labor struggle, a grassroots labor struggle within a tech behemoth, is also considered threatening by many of these companies.

We quickly pivoted and developed a larger team that would help us get our films into theaters. We did self distributed theatrical releases in 25 theaters across the United States. We rolled that up with an impact campaign, which includes partnering with labor organizations, economic organizations, campuses and unions to make sure that the film can be seen by workers. 

Maing: It’s also a story about scale. Here is a trillion dollar company whose executive has the financial power to purchase a newspaper and squash a presidential endorsement. Think about the levers of power that corporations have, versus what workers and organizers have. When a challenge emerges, corporations can challenge the constitutionality of the whole NLRB. This is what SpaceX, Amazon, Trader Joe’s executives have been doing.

And what levers of power do workers have? They have a power of communication — they set out to talk to each other at a bus stop and feed them pizza and hot dogs for 300 days straight. The fact that Amazon organizers were able to defeat such tremendous powers really speaks the importance of community organizing. Collective action can be really effective.

With regards to distribution, for our team it’s been really exciting to be able to use a broader kind of distributive production model that includes the people that we documented. In platforming the film by ourselves digitally we’ve been able to implement this functionality where other unions, working groups can take the film and partner with us to distribute it themselves. 

The Amazon Labor Union is a partner distributor, and 100 percent of the proceeds during their distribution of the film goes to their organizing. This really means a lot to us, that we make sure that we, as recipients of a very broken moment in our media landscape and distribution, don’t pass along that kind of behavior to the people that we care about and want to help.

DeVaan: What do you hope audiences take away from this film? Could you tell us more about your impact campaign or how you feel the documentary fits into the medium’s tradition of fighting oligarchy and corporate power?

Story: I feel like the emotional word that encapsulates the zeitgeist of the moment is powerlessness or hopelessness. We’re in a moment where there’s this recognition of scale, of this massive gulf between those who are controlling our lives at every single level, while all institutional mechanisms to hold them to account are dissipating. Even the basic levers of democracy feel like they’re fragile, if not eviscerated, right now. 

We’ve been in a dangerous place for a long time — we’ve got a climate on the verge of collapse, we’ve got governments in both parties that are taking policy positions that are clearly against the popular will on a number of major issues, whether it’s investment in working class communities and public infrastructure, or it’s sending money to fight unpopular military adventures abroad. 

We had the opportunity to document a group of people that despite their size, despite their supposed lack of experience, despite their youth, despite their marginalized status in society, said:

“Hell no, we won’t self censor in this spirit of defeat, we’re going to take on this company that tells us how to live and what the rules of our lives should be. Hell no, you can’t make us sick, you can’t keep us away from our children when they’re sick during a pandemic. You can’t tell us that we can’t go to the bathroom with adequate time. You can’t injure our bodies and then fire us.”

They took on this company, and they weren’t supposed to win. The rules of society right now are constantly telling us that ordinary people have no power. To document and witness this group of people demonstrate that we can have power and we can win I think in and of itself is useful. I think that’s precisely why Amazon considers this group of people so dangerous.

It’s not really about this one warehouse. Amazon, as a company, can go on just fine without this one functioning warehouse. It is the symbolic and contagious effect of witnessing a group of people, especially Black and brown, working class people, take on a company without money, without expertise, and prove victorious.

That is exactly what we as a society need right now — to see that happen and to know that we can do that too.

On a really basic level we think the film has value as a reminder to audiences that we are not as powerless as we think. All my work is political cinema. It’s really about trying to remind people that systems and structures have been made in certain ways and can also be unmade and ordinary people, equipped with the confidence and the knowledge of how those systems work, can take them on.

Cinema is no replacement for an organized campaign, or a strike, or other means of really shutting down production, but it’s an important part of the cultural and emotional landscape of resistance right now.

Maing: There’s something really notable about this moment because you’re seeing corporations as powerful as Amazon affect so many different kinds of people. The working class used to be conceived of as a very specific kind of demographic. But when you think about the impacts of the worst aspects of capitalism, it’s affecting people intersectionally.

We’re seeing that these movements are powerful when they activate the sense that we have shared experiences despite our differences. Something notable about the specific space of a warehouse in Staten Island, is that those organizers were not just like far left radicals — there were Trump supporters there, there were conservatives, every kind of political identity you could imagine was part of the group of workers that ultimately voted in favor.

As we talk about this idea of resistance, it’s really meaningful to realize in this moment that working class resistance is political. When you think about the worst things that are unfolding in this country and hurting the majority of us, they are tied to corporate power and wealth disparity that jumped the shark in an extreme and disturbing way.

I think this contemporary and broadened understanding of class struggle — affecting everything from a Hollywood writer who just lost their home in Altadena to an Amazon worker in Staten Island — is exactly the kind of conception of class struggle that we can actually make huge gains with.